This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

One of the best reasons to buy Matthew Berry’s new book, Fantasy Life, is to judge where you rate on the insanity scale of fantasy league participation. If you ever needed something to show your significant other and say, “See, I’m not that bad,” this is the book for you.

ESPN’s fantasy guru has written a fun, breezy book filled with stories of players and the lengths and means to which they will go to make sure they can attend drafts, offer underhanded deals in trades and even the most wild ways they can come up with to punish the loser of their leagues.

“Let’s see, the three craziest stories in the book are the tattoo guys, where the winner gets to decide a tattoo for the loser to get. Last year, it was a tattoo of Justin Bieber’s face. The guy who won it last year told me that if he wins again, it’s going to be a tattoo of Sharknado. The second one is Steven Straub, a soldier in Afghanistan, who was literally drafting while being bombed. He was so into it, he wouldn’t leave his draft,” says Berry.

“Then the third craziest story, and it’s actually my favourite story in the book, is about Chris Leeuw. He’s a guy who drafted a week after he was paralyzed from the neck down. Just all the things he had to go through just to draft: he was having a catheter being put in, he was paralyzed, he had two guys helping him, but he wanted to do this and it was important for him to do something normal after what happened to him. It was uplifting.”

Berry’s book is a compendium of these sorts of tales, told with humour and the shared understanding of what the world of fantasy leagues have come to mean to the millions of participants who play. It is also a stealth biography of the man who started out as a screenwriter, but transitioned to becoming an expert on games about games.

Article Continued Below

“It is part memoir,” he says. “The book is ultimately about what fantasy leagues mean to a bunch of people, including myself. Obviously, it has had a tremendous impact on my own life, and in a lot of small and big ways, it’s impacted other people in very funny ways, in crazy ways, and heartbreaking ways.”

According to an Ipsos Public Affairs study, 13 per cent of Americans play fantasy games, but it does feel over the past two decades that fantasy leagues have exploded, likely in part to the ease of setting up management online. Due to their popularity, they have earned TV coverage of their own, particularly on the NFL pre-game shows.

The other reason behind fantasy sports’ growth is that as analytics and metrics have come to play such a bigger role in most sports, the line between giving the opportunity for someone to play a fake general manager and reality is getting fuzzier. Berry can come up with a few baseball examples where fantasy gamers have used their expertise to get real jobs.

“I don’t know about the NFL, but we’ve seen it before in baseball. Ron Shandler, who is a fantasy baseball guy, runs the website BaseballHQ.com, was hired by the St. Louis Cardinals to be a consultant. Ultimately, he ended up leaving that job because he wanted to focus on fantasy,” says Berry. “There have been a number of examples that have written fantasy content, done stuff in fantasy sports, and then gone on to work in professional sports. Jason Gray, who wrote about fantasy baseball for ESPN, left last year to go be a scout for the Tampa Bay Rays. So there are definitely examples of it, certainly more so in baseball than in football, because I think football is less advanced analytically — there aren’t as many great stats. But I think that will happen one day.”

Despite the huge growth of fantasy leagues, one of the issues remains how best to cover them, particularly on TV. Most places still use a classic pre-game show set up of talking head experts, but one of the issues that makes pieces like Berry’s weekly “Start ’em, Sit ’em” advice segment difficult is because everybody’s teams are different. It absolutely lends itself to the web, although the next step could be linking it to a different type of gaming machine — the video game console.

Earlier this year, the NFL announced a landmark deal with Microsoft and will display real-time game and fantasy info during games this year for the company’s new Xbox One console, which is launching in November. The details remain unknown, but one thing that is likely coming is the ability to display your fantasy team on the TV screen while watching games in real time. That doesn’t sound all that much better than checking on phones or tablets, like most of us do during games, but with both huge entities working together hopefully they can come up with new ways to improve coverage, and potentially, even the fantasy games themselves.

But then, for most people — like many profiled in Berry’s book — the games about the real games are doing just fine, and there is no limit to what they’ll do to make sure their teams thrive.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com